Road Trip

As a boy, George Hamilton wanted to be a doctor, but his parents gave him no recourse but to be a movie star. Anne Stevens, his mother, was gorgeous and extravagant, and George William (Spike) Hamilton was a bandleader with a wandering eye. They divorced after Stevens found him in bed with his singer and declared, “You’ve taken a beautiful painting and smeared it.”

Hamilton, still lithe as a mahogany sapling at seventy, was recently in the Hamptons for a screening of “My One and Only,” a film based on an odd road trip that he and his brothers took with their mother in 1955. He sat on the porch of a friend’s house with one leg flung over the arm of a wicker chair, wearing a blue Borrelli shirt unbuttoned to the fourth button, linen pants from Loro Piana, and tasselled loafers by Ralph Lauren. No socks, naturally.

He remarked that it was his mother who taught him how to dress, which reminded him of how the Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli had provided him with a bespoke wardrobe—which reminded him that while he was in Rome filming “The Victors,” in 1963, he’d arranged to meet the world’s most beautiful woman, the actress Jocelyn Lane, in front of the Trevi Fountain. At her apartment, he folded his Agnelli-financed finery, and then, “just as I’m about to mount this incredible creature,” he said, her enraged boyfriend began pounding on the bedroom door. Naked, Hamilton ducked out the window and crept along a ledge until he could slip into what turned out to be the maid’s room: “So I know nothing to do except jump in bed with the maid!”

There was a lot more to the tale, involving a doorman’s coat, Robert Mitchum, and Lane’s boyfriend later popping up at P. J. Clarke’s, in Manhattan, wearing Hamilton’s suit. It was Hamilton’s raconteurship that got Merv Griffin, the talk-show host and producer, interested in developing the tale of the road trip in the seventies. “My brothers and I came home one day for lunch—I was at the Hackley School,” Hamilton said, laying out the premise, “and my mother, who was being pursued by creditors, had a TripTik map in her hand. She said, ‘We’re going on a vacation. We’re going to visit every man I ever went out with, from the time I was in Miss Semple’s finishing school, to find out if I made a mistake.’ ”

He continued, “She found the first one in St. Louis and told us, ‘Most divine man I ever met—he made the winning touchdown in the Harvard-Yale game. I just don’t want to surprise him with all of you.’ So at the restaurant my brothers and I waited in the car. Twenty minutes later, she came out and said, ‘Oh, my God. He’s let himself go.’ Further south, she’d tell the man, ‘Meet me on the corner,’ and we’d drive by very slowly and she’d say, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’ ” The family wound up in Mexico City, quarantined by a suspected case of parrot fever. “We had no money at all, nothing, but they had to feed us steaks at the hotel, and my mother said, ‘Don’t you see, there’s always good in everything? We’re divinely supported.’ And that was the story I told Merv in Acapulco.”

The project spent so many years in turnaround that Griffin died waiting, but the film was finally made, with Renée Zellweger as Hamilton’s mother and Logan Lerman as the courtly, conflicted fifteen-year-old Hamilton. Little is shown of Hamilton’s relationship with his father, whom he had moved in with for a year when he was eleven. But Hamilton recalls that that breather year saved his life. He and his father would meet for lunch at the King Cole Bar, where the senior Hamilton would give his son advice, “the secret stuff you needed to know about women. He said, ‘Always carry a handkerchief, and let her use it, let her cry.’ And, ‘Women will forget everything they’ve ever said. Allow them that.’ And it’s crude, but he said, ‘With women, remember the three ‘F’s. You have to feed them, every day. You have to fuck them, every day. And you have to fight them, every day.’ ” That’s a lot of work, no? “Every day,” Hamilton repeated, grinning.

A quick study, Hamilton promptly began an affair with his stepmother, June Howard—the woman his mother had caught in bed with his father. “Her pelvis would arrive across the room before the rest of her,” he explained.

Last month, Hamilton took part in a Q. & A. about “My One and Only” after a Hollywood Film Festival screening. After the credits rolled, he said, “the moderator asked me a question, and I couldn’t answer it. I was crying. I had never had that happen to me before, not at my mother’s funeral, my brother’s funeral. I couldn’t hold it together,” he said. “I’m slick, you know? But seeing that boy, me . . . it got to me.” ♦